Project implementation: Ecuador
Project development: Ecuador
Community water infrastructure to improve and strengthen the existing water network. A system of spaces for social interaction, appreciation, environmental care, and the transmission of knowledge about water protection. Shelters, weather stations for environmental monitoring, and meeting spaces.
La Chimba is located in the ancestral territory of the Kayambi tribe in northern Ecuador, near the Cayambe volcano. It's located in one of Ecuador's most important ecosystems, the Paramo, which boasts significant biodiversity and the territory's most important water sources.
La Chimba, with over a hundred years of historical resistance through self-management and self-organization, protects the territory and its water resources from various threats. Strengthening its infrastructure and reinforcing its social character is essential for its subsistence and future growth.
Community water infrastructure creates spaces to monitor, care for, and educate about the páramo territory, which provides water sources for life. In this way, the community values the work done in the past and strengthens processes to maintain the system in the future.
This architectural proposal is responsible for the site and the people of the community, who construct the buildings for collective use on participatory construction days called "Mingas" (mutirao), which encourage local work and knowledge exchange. The intention is to create spaces for access, meeting, and shelter through local techniques present in the community's buildings and terraces that, by their shape as retaining walls on slopes, integrate into the natural landscape, creating an intervention respectful of the páramo ecosystem.